I do not think
my mind will hold

out much longer.
I forget basic

details of conversations. I
walk into the kitchen

and forget my reason
for having walked

into the kitchen. I can
discern now when

people are being
polite by not

mentioning the fact that
it is the third

or fourth time I've
told that story again.

I am thirty-four
years of age.

Thirty-four
years of age. Thirty-

four years
of age.

I love baseball perhaps
now more than

ever before. It
requires no

memory, no cohesive
narrative, each

moment when the
pitcher releases the

ball its own
microcosm—

its own tick
in an atemporal clockwork

flush with gears but
lacking cogs entirely,

a moment savored
and then quickly

forgotten, like
the taste of a

perfectly ripe summer
strawberry, smothered

by the sweltering haze
of a mid-July afternoon.

The walrus lacks
a rudimentary understanding

of the relationship
between seasonal temperatures

and the amount of sea ice
generated annually

in the northern hemisphere,
and cannot formulate

even a basic hypothesis
that might draw a link between

the lack of sea ice and
a massive surge in coastal overcrowding

among those of his own kind.
Nor could we expect the walrus

to comprehend that
this overcrowding has become so severe that

many walruses are continually driven
to seek out higher and higher ground,

and may suddenly find themselves
precariously perched atop the tall, frozen, rocky cliffs

of the Russian arctic coast,
hundreds of meters above the sea,

as their pinniped flippers
lose traction, and the rocks and gravel

beneath them give way
under their considerable bulk.

It would be a bridge too far
for us to expect

that the walrus might understand
the anatomy of even his own eye

such that he would know
that the curvature of its lens

is well-suited for underwater vision,
but is, in fact, maladapted

for making spatial judgements
while on land.

And yet,
we are aware of all of these things,

of this horrifying confluence of circumstances
for which we’re at least partly to blame,

and from which the walrus
now finds himself unable to escape.

And we watch it all unfold silently,
so passively:

those hulking ruins

as they tumble down
the cliff faces,

one by one,

wild-eyed,
terrified,

bewildered and breaking
in their final moments.

Power flexes
downward:

a hulking, indifferent
appendage

obscene in its
obviousness,

but the obviousness is the
point,

you remind
me.

This latest one was only twenty-
six

and seemingly healthy, but no
matter—

in Hokkaido by now the
larches

have all dropped their
needles,

and the fumaroles of Mount
Asahidake

still hiss, even while
covered

in heaps of snow. I wish
that

you could take me there. I
wish

that we could set
off

into that pale oblivion and never
return,

immersed for the rest of our
days

in the frigid, accurate
waters

of Nature’s
reality.

But she has no dominion
here,

you remind
me,

and we are all just tourists in this place
anyhow,

sidling beneath cornices and sidestepping
crevasses

aslope an angry volcano in
winter,

that warm, glowing lodge at its
foot

seemingly never
drawing

any
closer.

Wind howling through trees
outside my bedroom window.
Hands. Childhood fears.

I spotted a gull flying over the bay
not more than a foot ‘tween her wings and the waves,
with feathers unfurled, flap and flail as she try,
she hadn’t the strength left to climb toward the sky.

I spotted a gull flying over the trees,
unable to fight the northwesterly breeze,
he tottered while gliding, unsure of his route,
completely resigned now to be blown about.

I spotted a gull in the jaws of a shark,
his hollow bones breaking, with blood running dark.
His face was of shock now, amid razor teeth;
how could he have known what was lurking beneath?

I spotted a gull on a rock, old and frail,
her beak nestled close to protect from the gale,
alone on a cliff ringed by thundering sea.
I wondered what plans fate was making for me.

Being able to wield
the lexicon
of morality

is not the same
as being
a moral person.

The the only real differences
between this reality

and dystopia

that I can discern now

are set design and lighting.

I check the weather
several times every day,

type the same URL
several times every day,

and click on the
Ten-Day Forecast several times

every day,
but nothing ever changes.

Fifty degrees and sunny,
all throughout January

and into February
and March after that.

There was a time
when I was a child

when snow fell from the sky
as though heaven’s railroad workers

were laboring day and night
to shovel it over their shoulders

and down through the clouds it would cascade,
its flakes as big and light as down feathers,

falling onto my tongue
and melting into a spot of singular cold.

But anymore,
the weather never changes.

The muted sunlight
simply cuts through the sky

in a flaccid, dull gesture
that mingles with car exhaust

and factory fumes
in a bizarre ritual

that burns my eyes
and singes my lungs.

Somewhere deep
between my navel and my sternum,

I understand that those old days
will never return,

and that those railroad workers,
their skins caked with dirt and moisture,

have long since slung their shovels
over their shoulders,

and wiped the sweat
from their foreheads,

and boarded that train

as it slowly, steadily,
mercilessly chugs

toward some destination
where I am not allowed to be.

I dreamt I was walking across the high plains,
through the husk of a small American town.

The air was hazy
with distant smoke. The sun was high in a

muted, cloudless sky. The heat radiated
through my temples. I was parched, older, leathery, searching.

I came upon
a rusted-out school bus on the side of a dirt road

I walked in. The seats had been removed
from the bus. Along the left side lay

a long row of bedridden, elderly adults, comatose and naked,
each one receiving the slow drip of a tincture into the mouth:

clear nectar oozing from a carnivorous plant
hanging from the bus’s ceiling.

There were small children, also naked,
standing there in the bus. Their eyes

were covered with dark patches. As I turned
to leave, walking back down toward the road,

one of the children tugged on my leg. I turned
to address the child, our faces now nearly meeting,

and I saw that her eyes were not covered,
but removed. Two spindly black voids hung there

instead. “It's okay,” the child said to me.
“You don't need to be afraid.”

*      *      *

I continued down the road, the air
murky, salty, boiling, deadly.

A neon billboard with an American flag waving
shone off in the distance.

behind it loomed a giant radio tower,
hard at work transmitting,

but I knew that its broadcasts
were never meant for me to begin with.